Graham Joyce - The Silent Land

She told him about the water. ‘Maybe it’s frozen.’

‘Maybe the generators in the village have just stopped pumping it. Don’t worry about it. We’ll drink red wine.’

Jake was already drinking red wine. No matter how much he downed, he didn’t seem to get drunk. Zoe was not so sure. Previously she had happily joined him in sampling the best bottles, but now she was much more cautious. Too many strange things were happening and she wanted to keep a straight head. Plus there was her baby to think about, even in this world.

She hid her anxiety. When Jake was at her side she made a determined effort to keep things light; but when he went away for a few minutes, perhaps to fetch another bottle of wine, she got up and went to the glass doors of the reception, trying to peer through the mist, looking for movement.

And she saw it. Or if not movement, then in the form of more dark grey shapes. The mist billowed and drifted and she saw them again. The men. But now they were six. All in the same place as before. All gazing steadily back at the hotel, and smoking, smoking, smoking.

‘Come quickly,’ she said to Jake when he returned with a bottle of fine Bordeaux. ‘But keep out of sight.’

He came up behind her, holding her, looking over her shoulder. She pointed a finger at the vague outline of the six men, all of them waiting like crows or patient birds of prey, watching the hotel.

‘What is it?’

‘Six of them. Now there are six.’

‘Where?’

‘Surely you can see them, Jake! Surely you can see their shape in the mist!’

‘I don’t see anything. Where are you looking?’

‘There! And there! And there!’

Jake squinted into the mist. He shook his head minimally. He creased his forehead.

‘Jake, tell me you can see six grey shapes! Just over there!’

Jake turned her to face him. ‘I think you’ve been hallucinating stuff.’

‘Look! Look! That’s not a hallucination! They are all smoking cigarettes, staring back at us! You’ve seen the cigarette ends—that’s where they’re coming from!’

‘I’ve seen the fag-ends, my darling, but I can’t see anything or anyone. There’s nothing there. Look, I’ll go outside and check if it’ll make you feel any better.’

‘Don’t you dare go out there!’

‘Okay, okay, be calm. We’ll stay here.’

Jake settled her by the fire again but not without her darting looks across her shoulder at the mist—and the grey figures she perceived outside. He sat with her, holding her cold hands, watching her, searching her face for external signs of internal distress.

Then he said, ‘Do we still have two blue lines?’

‘What?’

He nodded.

‘You know?’

‘Of course I know.’

She vented a huge sigh and hugged her midriff.

‘Did you think,’ he said, ‘you could keep that a secret from me? In this place, where nothing else is happening but you and me?’ He was smiling.

‘You’re not angry?’

‘Never. I was just waiting for you to tell me yourself that you were carrying our baby.’ He looked at her with eyes full of anger and pity and desperate love. He took her hand and kissed it. It was a while before they spoke.

‘How did you know?’

‘I think you’ve got about a gross of those kits hidden in the room alone.’

‘Right. Maybe I wanted you to find them. I’ve been testing several times a day. Sometimes hourly. I want it to change. And I don’t want it to change. Would you have been happy, if it had been before? Before all this?’

‘Given how I feel now? Yes I would. It would have been ecstasy.’

‘And now?’

‘I’ve been watching you carefully, knowing that you’re carrying our baby. I don’t mind telling you I’ve been worried.’

‘About the baby?’

‘Yes. And about the mother. You get cold; I don’t. You get hungry; I don’t. You get frightened by everything; I don’t.’

She flicked an involuntary glance towards the glass doors. ‘You mean to say you’re not afraid? Not afraid of what’s out there?’

He shook his head, no.

‘That can’t be true,’ she said. ‘I saw you take the axe with you when you went outside.’

‘That was to reassure you, not me.’

‘Why aren’t you afraid, Jake? This place terrifies me.

I want to know what’s going to happen to us; to our baby.’

‘I can’t explain why I’m not scared. I only know that my job is to look after you.’

‘What’s going to happen to our baby? What’s going to happen?’

Jake sighed. It was the sigh of one who has no answer. He opened his mouth as if to speak and then changed his mind. Then he framed his lips into an O as if about to try again. But he was interrupted. Zoe’s mobile phone rang.

It was ringing from her coat pocket, which she was wearing under her duvet. She almost ripped it from her pocket.

Jake took it from her. ‘Let me answer it.’

He pressed the answer button and held the cellphone to his ear. He remained expressionless. He said nothing. Then he clicked off the phone and handed it back to her.

‘Who was it? What did they say?’

‘Same as before.’

‘Did the voice say la zone ? Is that what it said? The zone?’

‘It was hard to make out, but I don’t think he said la zone at all. He said laissez sonner . Which means let it ring . Laissez sonner. Then it went dead.’

‘He wants me to let it ring?’

‘That’s what he said.’

‘Why would he say that? Laissez sonner. Why would he tell you to let it ring?’

‘I’ve no idea.’ Jake checked the battery level. ‘There’s not much charge left in this. But I think we should put it aside and if it rings, we just leave it.’

‘Why?’

‘Because that’s what he said.’

‘But how do you know that’s a good thing? How do you know that it’s not someone who wants to harm us? Maybe by answering it we’re keeping him away. Have you thought of that?’

‘No one is going to harm us.’

‘You can’t say that. You don’t know!’

‘We’re in a place beyond harm.’

Zoe clasped her belly. ‘I wish I could believe that. But I don’t. Who is calling us? Who are those men out there?’

‘You’re feverish. Come on; keep warm.’ He threw another couple of logs on the fire. ‘Damn these logs! They don’t last five minutes!’

Jake got up and set Zoe’s mobile phone on the recep tion desk. Then he sat down beside her again, and they watched the phone, from that short distance, as if it might perform an act of combustion, like indoor fireworks.

It didn’t ring.

Her teeth were chattering again. She was feverish, but it was a cold fever; she just couldn’t get warm. Jake piled her with covers and stoked the fire and while his back was turned she looked over at the window.

There it was again, a face. A scarf masking the lower half. Darting eyes, the hint of red lips above the scarf. The eyes were like pinpoints of fire, grains of light; those half-hidden lips were moving, forming unheard words.

She was on the point of warning Jake when the window itself shattered, and glass crystals rained into the room. The pressure within the lobby escaped into the dark and a wind from outside roared and shrieked, driving a blast of cold air around the room, gusting at the fire, threatening to blow out the flames. The wind shrieked and the mist roiled in at the broken window like wraiths liberated, baleful, mischievous, searching.

Jake leapt to his feet and grabbed a mattress. He dragged it to the window, ramming it hard into the aperture, stuffing it until it filled the hole, muffling the shrieking wind.

She was shivering now, too violently to speak, to tell him what she had seen at the window before the glass blew in.